March 11, 2025 • 40 mins
Dr. Chris Palmer serves as the Dean of Ministry and Theology at Southeastern University. He earned his PhD from Bangor University in Wales, UK, and has authored eight books. His research focuses on the Book of Revelation, the concepts of suffering and theodicy. In this episode, Dr. Palmer sheds light on the enduring question of suffering: If God is good, why does He permit good people to endure suffering?
Dr. Palmer in this episode:
• Describes how witnessing the aftermath of Pol Pot's killing fields in Cambodia sparked his research journey
• Explains how historical events like the 1755 Lisbon earthquake shifted cultural perspectives on God and suffering
• Analyzes three major theodicies: free will theodicy, soul-making theodicy, and greater good theodicy
• Argues that Scripture doesn't attempt to reconcile God's goodness with evil's existence
• Proposes that living with hope and justice represents a form of protest against evil
Dr. Palmer is working on a book titled "A World Without God"
(Zondervan, 2026)
Link to Dr. Chris Palmer
https://www.instagram.com/chrispalmer/
-Links-
https://www.svetkapopov.com/
https://www.instagram.com/svetka_popov/
Mark as Played
Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:00):
This is a really special episode with a unique
guest, dr Chris Palmer, who's apastor and a professor of
theology at SoutheasternUniversity.
Dr Palmer holds a PhD fromBangor University where, in his
thesis, he examined the book ofRevelation and the problem of
evil, suffering and theodicy.
So the big question we ask inthis episode is why is there
(00:20):
human suffering if there is aloving God?
And maybe this is a questionthat you also wrestled with at
(00:48):
some point.
Maybe you're a person of faithand maybe you're not.
But what I was curious about iswhat were the findings from Dr
Palmer's research of over sixyears of digging into the
subject and studying it?
And also I was curious to seewhat made him into the subject
and studying it.
And also I was curious to seewhat made him want to study the
(01:08):
subject of suffering, becauseit's not something that one sets
out to study on a regular day,right?
So let's see what Dr Palmer'sthoughts are on this subject.
Hey friends, welcome to the Oneswho Dared podcast, where
stories of courage are elevated.
I'm your host, becca, and everyother week you'll hear
interviews from inspiring people.
My hope is that you will leaveencouraged.
I'm so glad you're here, drChris Palmer, welcome to the
(01:42):
Once a Year podcast.
I'm so honored that you agreedto come on here.
Speaker 2 (01:47):
It's so good to be with you and thanks for having
me on.
I know that it's hard-pressedto find people that want to talk
about suffering.
Speaker 1 (01:53):
Yeah, so we are the two crazies that actually want
to talk about suffering.
I'll tell you for me why thatwas of importance for me and why
it intrigued me to bring you onin the first place.
So for the last couple of yearsI've been doing some research
in my family history, andspecifically my grandmother, who
was in the Nazi concentrationcamp as a teen.
(02:14):
Then later she became abeliever, suffered for her faith
under the communist governmentin the former Soviet Union, and
so just learning about her story, how much injustice she had to
endure like completely outsideof her control, Right, and so
that made me go into this wholerabbit hole of suffering.
And then I heard you speak onsuffering and you did a whole
(02:37):
thesis and I was like, okay, wejust got to bring this guy on
and let's just dig into it,let's talk about it, you know,
and so.
I'm curious to see what made youstudy suffering, because that
is not a fun subject to study byany means.
Speaker 2 (02:52):
Oh, it's not.
I think that all of us in fact,I know that all of us come to
places in our life where we'reconfronted by various forms of
suffering.
There's all kinds of suffering.
Some of those forms ofsuffering happen because of evil
.
Some of them are just notnecessarily directly connected
to any obvious or apparent sortof evil happened to us.
(03:26):
But with suffering comesquestions, and sometimes those
questions become more than wecan bear, and the way that we
explore those is throughresearch or rational thinking
about that.
When I was pastoring years agothat was about 2018, I went on a
trip to Cambodia to teach tosome of the Cambodian people
that our church had been inpartnership with and I was just
(03:49):
finishing up my master's work atthe time, where I just finished
and I thought about thepossibility of doing doctoral
work, but I really didn't haveanything that was sticking out
to me as what I wanted to do.
Parallel to that time, I wasstanding in the killing fields
of Pol Pot.
We'd had a day to just kind ofexplore Cambodia and hang out
(04:10):
and see what the history was allabout, and then I learned the
fields that I was standing in.
That particular field, 110,000people were killed in the 70s
and had lost their lives underPol Pot's regime and, to my
surprise, lives under Paul Pazregime.
And you know, to my surprise,at the end of that I guess you
(04:30):
could say tour that we were onthere was a tower of skulls 200
feet tall.
You could Google it, it wouldpop up.
I stood before and saw skullsof people that once lived and I
remember focusing on.
It's easy just to see like asea of skulls, but it became all
the more powerful focusing inon individual skulls knowing
that those teeth belong tosomebody, that frame that they
(04:55):
had was somebody, those eyesockets belong to somebody who
saw the world and saw the future, and so it really kind of
stopped me dead in my tracks.
It's hard to shake it and I hada lot of questions that
conflicted with my frameworksfor doing theology and I
realized that in all of myschooling I had never really had
(05:17):
a good answer for suffering andinjustice that takes place at
the hands of a, indirectly atthe hands of a good, benevolent
God, and it's something thatanybody who thinks about God,
who is a theist of some sort,even a deist, thinks about at
some point.
You have to, and it's verydifficult to reconcile those two
(05:38):
things evil, slash, sufferingand the goodness of God.
So for six years I went on ajourney and an exploration and
did my best not to reallyreconcile that question but to
see where a rational explorationof that would lead, especially
for myself who's a Pentecostal.
We're so used to preachinghealing and the goodness of God
(06:00):
and deliverance, and so I reallyleaned into my Pentecostal
tradition to develop thequestion and move it forward.
And it was an interesting sixyears.
Speaker 1 (06:13):
Yeah, and I mean, I think that's a question that
most people ask, even people whoaren't part of faith is like
why is there suffering?
Why is there injustice, why isthere evil in the world?
Like why is there suffering?
Why is there injustice, why isthere evil in the world?
If there is a God and if God islove, as you know, we say he is
, and just the patterns ofhumanity and human history,
there's always been tyrannicalrules.
(06:34):
You have the Roman Empire, asfar back as you can date in
history.
There's just been consistentsuffering, and I think one of
the most common things abouthumanity is none of us are
without suffering.
It may look different forpeople and um, but essentially,
at the end of the day, none ofus can make it out alive without
um, having endured some form ofsuffering and um.
(06:57):
And yeah, it is an interestingthing to reconcile because and
like you said, you didn't reallyreally you didn't go on this
path to reconcile the question,but just to see what would come
of it, what would you get out ofit.
So, from your six years ofresearch, which is a lot to dig
into that, what were some thingsthat you came across that stood
out to you or things that youfelt like you got out of that.
Speaker 2 (07:19):
Yeah.
So where I basically startedwas trying to reconcile that
question.
I thought somehow some dustybook in a library that had yet
to be discovered, or I was goingto rediscover it and kind of
pull something forward thatshows that there's a way to
reconcile the goodness of an allpowerful, all loving God and
(07:42):
the existence of suffering.
And I wasn't able to do thatand I knew that maybe like five
months in, this wasn't going tohappen, you know.
So what do you do?
But I think that the fruitfulpart of it was looking at how
it's been looked at and kind ofseeing that from various
perspectives and how we look atthings, and kind of seeing that
(08:05):
from various perspectives andhow we look at things.
So one of the things that I didargue for in my thesis and made
the argument was that I wasparticularly dealing with the
book of Revelation, although Icould say this pretty
confidently about the entiretyof the biblical text and the
(08:26):
scriptures that we have is thatit's not really, or not at all
an attempt to reconcile thosetwo points the goodness of God
and the existence of evil thatbrings suffering.
There's no rational explanationfor why that happens, the way
that we attempt to try torationalize those things.
It's not formulaic, there's noalgorithm to it.
Particularly in the NewTestament we see portions of
(08:47):
Revelation that deal with it.
We don't see direct mentions ofsuffering as an explanation,
but we see suffering happeningbut nobody really trying to
preach and explain why thesethings happen.
Um, or particularly, I meanthere's.
There's explanations for whycertain sorts of suffering
happens, but no real explanationfor the goodness of God and
(09:07):
suffering.
And so this is more of aphilosophical question.
It gets out of theology and Iwould argue that theology is
everything that takes placeinside of the world of the text.
So when we're talking theology,we're making sense of what
actually is in scripture, what'sthere.
But if it's not there, thenwe're moving away from it and
(09:31):
we're coming into moreabstractions and we're talking
about philosophy at that moment.
And so, kind of going back towhen this really became the
question of all questions I wasable to.
What I found is is you know,this question goes back all the
way to.
Epicurus was asking these sortsof questions.
It kind of moved its way alongthroughout history.
But it really settles uponculture, I suppose in society in
(09:55):
the 17th century, when there isa great, or 18th century, when
there's a great earthquake inlisbon and people lose their
lives on um november 1st, okay,which is all saints day, people
are going to church in lisbonand people lose their lives.
On November 1st, which is AllSaints Day, people are going to
church in Lisbon.
They're going to recognize thegoodness of God and God's mercy,
and this earthquake takes placeand people lose their lives and
(10:15):
they die.
How do you reconcile that?
I mean 30,000 people died in anearthquake.
That's 10 times what we had in9-11.
And Voltaire begins this harshcritique on God.
He begins to kind of move itaway from the goodness of God
into why would God let somethinglike this happen?
And that's the framework thatwe have to work with today.
(10:36):
That's what we're dealing with,and so when you look at the
question, you start with twosuppositions.
You have two of them that arediametrically opposed.
God is good, god isall-powerful, you have the
qualities of God and you haveevil exists.
And so when you're dealing withthese sorts of premises, you
(10:58):
have to reconcile them, but inreconciling them, you always
prioritize one over the other.
Prior to this earthquake, peopleprioritized the fact that God
was good.
That was unquestionable, andyou'd look at the world in the
lens of the goodness of God.
You would just see the worldthat way, and though suffering
was taking place, that was anuncompromisable premise.
(11:19):
I mean, others would do it.
You can find writings of peopledoing it, but that wasn't
apropos or the default settingof the day.
Fast forward to this, earthquaketakes place, then the premises
and how people begin toprioritize those, it gets
changed, and so now you havesuffering happens.
What are you going to do aboutthe goodness of God?
(11:40):
And so that kind of sets us ina trajectory where we find
ourselves today because of whatour advances in science and what
modernity has given to us, anage where we have developed in
technology, developed ininformation.
It's really borne down on ourscientific worldview that we've
taken from the Enlightenment,and so God is really in his
(12:02):
characteristics and hisqualities is ours.
The burden of proof is ontheists to really prove that out
, and it's very difficult to doempirically or rationally, and
that's why in apologetic circles, once that question comes up,
it is an unanswerable question.
No-transcript a.
(12:23):
I've seen good answers, but Ihaven't seen that smoking gun
that everybody wants, and Idon't think we're going to see
that, because I think that thatkind of moves us along to the
nature of faith and belief.
So that's where we findourselves and yes, it's, it
seems grim, but it really isn't,because there's other ways
forward, I think.
Speaker 1 (12:44):
Yeah.
So when you say good answers,what are some of the good
theories that people come upwith for suffering?
Speaker 2 (12:50):
Like you have free will.
Speaker 1 (12:51):
So there's evil in the world because we're free to
do what we want.
Speaker 2 (12:57):
Yeah.
So there's several of them,there's three I think, that are
namely pretty popular.
They're called theodicies.
I'm sure of course you're awareof that.
Theodicy is a big word.
It's not to be something thatintimidates.
It's theos, which is the wordGod, and DK, which means justice
or defense, or it gives theidea of a court case.
So theodicy is a defense of God.
(13:19):
You're essentially, when you'redoing theodicy it can be used
as a verb You're attempting todefend God from the accusations
that are made where he's kind ofon the hot seat and even though
he's not directly responsible.
I mean we could kind of do awaywith some of the language in
the Old Testament as beinghyperbolic or suggest that it
wasn't as literal.
You can do all that, but youcan't get away from the fact
(13:40):
that if this happened, that it'splausible that God is
indirectly responsible for thesethings.
So he would be on the hot seatIf he had the power to stop it.
He didn't.
He's indirectly the cause ofevil.
So theodicy comes along andattempts to defend God from
being on that hot seat, asyou're mentioning.
The first one that is verypopular and is the most popular
(14:01):
is the Augustinian free willtheodicy that people use.
It's essentially that humankindhad free will and because of
their free will they broughtevil into the earth.
And now there's this uh planthat we're on where god is
redeeming us through christjesus, because of the evil that
we caused, because of free will,and that has traditionally made
(14:23):
its way around the church themost, and probably is something
that pastors and teachers willuse to lean into.
I don't think two things.
I think what Augustine wasdoing was he was attempting to
use theology as a way to answerthat question.
I don't think the Bible isreally trying to by showing that
man has used free will tochoose sinfulness.
(14:47):
I don't think that is the textexplaining to us.
This is why this is how youreconcile those two propositions
.
I don't think that's whatthat's doing, not an attempt to
reconcile that.
It's just telling the story andthen, kind of, we read our, we
use our paradigms to tell thatstory.
But the problem with the freewill theodicy is that it is
limited.
(15:07):
It doesn't really get toquestions that are deeper than
that.
Okay, so let's just take him athis premise that free will is
what brought evil into the world.
Well then the next questionbecomes if God truly created a
perfect world and all thingsperfect, why did the ability to
choose evil actually exist?
(15:29):
And where did the evil comefrom if all things were perfect
for it to exist?
And then, quite naturally, thenext response is well, it came
from satan.
Well then, that whole scheme ofthinking goes back to satan and
angels, and so eventually youkind of have to appeal, appeal
to mystery, and then it doesn'treally get at where the impulse,
um, to choose evil came.
(15:49):
I mean, if before the choosingof evil, there has to be the
thought to choose evil or theimpulse to choose evil that's
part of the equation where didthat come and why even is there
a choice?
It would seem that somethingthat's perfect is always going
to choose perfectly.
Um, that's, that's one of thearguments.
And so, and if all thingsperfect, why is there an
imperfect choice to make?
(16:10):
So we could explore that moreif we'd like to, but it goes
down that road and it nevercomes back from that road.
So you move away from that.
And then the next ways toexplain evil one would be the
soul-making theodicy.
This is pretty popular in a lotof our Christian writings that
(16:30):
we find when we're talking aboutnominal forms of suffering.
The reason why I dented my car,because I was in a rush and I
backed into a pole and God wastrying to teach me patience.
Or you know the reason why Ilost my keys today and I was
(16:53):
late for work and I ended uplosing my job.
You know, something like thatis God's just trying to teach me
to slow down, and so all theforms of suffering that we
experienced become ways that webuild up our God is building us
and making us and he's shapingus.
And where that maybe can beargued in scripture are passages
where that's exactly whatpersecution does.
(17:16):
I mean there is directconnections to persecution being
something that producesfaithfulness in the believer,
something that producesrighteousness in the believer,
that helps us to understand thesufferings of Christ.
But those are connections topersecution that actually have
to do with following Jesus.
The problem with this sort ofsoul-making suffering is that it
(17:37):
works for some things.
I would never deny somebody whosays you know, I lost my keys
and God taught me patience.
That's very possible, that's agiven.
But what do we do withsomething like you're talking
about?
When it comes to the holocaust?
How do you explain a genocide?
Right, the genocide happened sothat the world could learn
about, about what so it costs?
(17:58):
You know, six million pluspeople, their lives a whole,
this is what it takes.
Or you know somebody who'scoming out of 9-11 and saying
the reason this happened is sothat this could happen.
Well, what about the sufferers,the 3,000 people, and then
their families?
And then you know it's easy toreally make the soul-making
(18:19):
theodicy work when you'reexperiencing minimal forms of
suffering.
Or you're not the suffererforms of suffering, or you're
not the sufferer.
Now some people will use thattheory to kind of explain their
conditions and and I'm notsaying that that hasn't been
done, it can't be done, but itonly gets really so far, uh, and
.
And then you have to ask otherquestions like, well, why does
(18:39):
it take this, why does it takeme suffering, why can't god do
it some other way?
And that that's a validquestion for that.
And so at you know, at worst itbecomes a little bit
insensitive, not a little bit, awhole lot of it, insensitive at
points.
And you know it should never bea default reaction.
When someone comes into youroffice and is looking for
(19:01):
pastoral care and they'reexplaining why, you know they're
, they're going throughsomething traumatic in their
lives and you know, you kind ofpoint to it and they say, well,
I've had an abused past.
Well, the reason you've had anabused past is because look at
you now, you know you're doingso great in ministry and it's
like really.
This is all to do good inministry.
That's what it came down.
I had to go through this.
(19:22):
What about all the other peoplethat have to go through that?
And then, of course, maybe aneven more popular one is greater
good theodicy.
So you're not talking aboutnecessarily.
This was used to build up mysoul, but God lets evil happen
so that he can perform a greatergood.
So God allowed sin into theworld and God allowed evil into
the world because we're going tohave the new Jerusalem now.
(19:44):
That's going to be even better.
So God got this huge victory inspite of sin, or you know,
tragedies have produced agreater good for society.
You know, a child loses hislife in a car accident, but it
brings the community together.
But again, those kind of go backto the same questions why did
it have to be through this?
Couldn't have been through that?
(20:05):
What kind of abhorhorrent,monstrous god would choose the
death of a child to bring acommunity together?
Now it can bring a communitytogether, but the question
that's actually being answeredasked is why did it take this to
to do that?
I mean, good can come out ofevil, but does good require evil
and suffering to actually takeplace?
(20:27):
That's what that theodicy isadvancing and and it's if you're
hard-pressed to say that's thecase, and so a lot of these
theodicies kind of lock you intosomething that's dangerous, and
that is god absolutely needs umsuffering to bring about these
goods and god doesn't need.
God does not need suffering andgod does not need evil, he is
not codependent on evil to bringabout these goods and God
(20:47):
doesn't need, god does not needsuffering and God does not need
evil, he is not codependent onevil to bring about his good.
And so it leaves our minds kindof boggled.
But then, you know, you movesort of forward in all this and
you have a group called theanti-theodicy or
anti-theodicists, and they'rejust completely against thinking
about and exploring sufferingand in any rational way.
(21:09):
At first, you know, I was like,okay, I like this because they
feel that when you talk aboutevil and suffering it, we do
have minds and we just can'tturn them off when it comes to
(21:29):
evil and that there is a placefor rationally talking about
these types of things.
But I think, you know, thehealthy thing is to suppose that
these do work in some cases,but they don't work in all cases
and, um, you know, they do findtheir limits, and so it kind of
leads us back to square one.
So so how do you reconcile thetwo, the two premises, and
(21:52):
rationally they'reirreconcilable in my opinion.
Speaker 1 (22:00):
Okay, Well, that was, that was like well, that's
great.
Speaker 2 (22:03):
But how do you go from here?
Speaker 1 (22:05):
You know, um, but like in your study, what, what
would you say were some of thethings that you walked away with
?
Like okay I've done six yearsand I've been told like maybe
next subject you study will bejoy, so you don't have to in
order to like experience it.
And maybe in in those six yearsyou've had your own share of
(22:28):
suffering.
I don't know.
But what were some of yourconclusions or your takeaway
from that?
Speaker 2 (22:37):
Yeah.
So that's a great question.
I think you know I always getthis response especially.
You know, thanksgivings were alot of fun when I was studying
all this because I would behaving a good time.
And here comes Chris theSufferer.
That was my nickname, by theway.
All throughout my thesis wasChris the Sufferer, because I
was thinking about it so indepth and I'm in Florida now.
(22:59):
I think I knew I needed the sun,you know, to get me out of this
dark gloom of suffering.
But there are a lot of peoplethat have to really think about
suffering.
I mean, I would remind people Iwas blessed that up to this
point in my life I haven't hadto think about suffering other
than rationally, throughself-study and analysis, instead
of experientially, becausethere are people every day that
(23:20):
are going to the hospital andvisiting their sick loved ones
and have to think about it allday, every day.
I think there's a few thingsthat were takeaways, big
takeaways for me, and I thinkthat I hope to contribute to
Pentecostal ethos and thePentecostal theology of
suffering.
Number one suffering is causedby evil.
It's not a rational enterprisein its fullness.
(23:44):
We can't.
This is not going to besolvable and it's going to take
more than thinking to really getus out of this and that may
just be something that we haveto understand when we're doing
apologetics is that this deadends at some point.
But thankfully, our apologeticand our defense of Christ
doesn't end with where we answerthe suffering question.
(24:07):
I think our greatest apologeticis the Spirit and how the
Spirit moves us and how the HolySpirit moves us in suffering,
that there's something isconvicting about the fact that,
yeah, we don't really know whythis happens totally and why
evil is doing what it's doing,but we do know that.
We do know the story that Godsent Christ into the world and
(24:27):
that he sent the Spirit from theSon, and the Spirit is what
empowers us to act responsiblyand to act in forms of
restoration while people aresuffering, and those aren't
always grandiose ways.
I was reading a story in theearly Pentecostal literature
(24:48):
when I did my studies, and thestory is called Pentecost at a
Funeral and there was a womanwho was deeply grieved at the
loss of her child I think thechild was it couldn't have been
more than three months old.
The child was sick and thechild died.
And there was a pastor his namewas Pastor Clark Eckert and his
wife and they went to ministerto the Beree family.
(25:08):
And the was a pastor his namewas Pastor Clark Eckert and his
wife, and they went to ministerto the Bereave family.
And the pastor's telling thisfirst-person narrative and he's
not trying to posit any sort oftheodicy.
There's no explanation, butthere is a genuine, we would say
, a move of the Spirit.
There's a genuine demonstrationor presence of the Spirit that
was with that woman.
That was able to not mitigateher suffering or to try to
(25:35):
explain away what had takenplace, but it was enough to
bring that woman a hope that shewould see her daughter again or
her child again not sure it wasa girl or boy, but that she
would see her child again, seeher daughter again or her child
again I'm not sure it was a girlor boy but that she would see
her child again and that herchild would was in the arms of
Christ and in the arms of Jesus.
And there's no real explanationfor that, as to why that
(25:58):
happened, but it is.
It's a.
And then in that there's allthese other things that take
place.
I mean there's reading ofScripture that takes place
concerning comfort.
They're able to go to the bookof Ephesians and they see the
text in a way that they haven'tseen before.
They see the goodness of God inways that they haven't seen
before.
And so I think that insuffering, there's ways about
(26:22):
suffering, there's things thathappen within those that help us
to draw on the goodness of God,to realize the goodness of God
that's taking place, and insteadof just seeing monster God and
hateful God, somehow we stillsee the goodness of God, and
that is, I think, one of thethings that we have to draw on
(26:43):
is the Spirit's response.
There's also examples of peoplewho are the sufferers
themselves in the text andthey're going through the
suffering.
But the same thing, there'sreally a move of the Spirit in
the presence of God, wherethey're able to see suffering,
and they're suffering and notrelent and not lose hope.
(27:04):
So, as a Pentecostal, I thinkit's important that in times of
suffering, that we're able todraw on the Spirit and hear the
Spirit in those forms you know,in the book of Revelation.
When you have these churches,like the church at Smyrna or the
church at Philadelphia, andthey're going through suffering,
what Christ says to them ishear what the Spirit is saying.
(27:30):
I think that there's in thosemoments an opportunity to hear
the Spirit, hear what the Spiritis saying and that ministers to
us in our suffering, but itdoesn't answer it, it doesn't
give us the question, it tellshow to reconcile the premises,
but there's opportunity insuffering, whether we're the
sufferer or someone else is thesufferer, to understand the
(27:52):
goodness of God.
It kind of brings me back to acouple of well, I'd say, a year
and a half ago, when, at the endof my thesis, when my mom, you
know, goes to the hospital andshe's, I get a call one day and
I was living in Tennessee thatmy mom is, you know, has sepsis.
It just kind of happened.
She had a stomach ache, shegoes to the hospital, she goes
(28:13):
septic, and I get a random callthat my mom, who is pretty
healthy, who I just had talkedto a couple of days ago, you
know, come home.
You're going to be sayinggoodbye to your mom.
So that's a lot to just get inone afternoon.
So I, that's a lot to just getin one afternoon.
So I'm a wreck and drive up totennessee as fast as I can.
Get to the hospital.
My mom is all hooked up, youknow, breathing tubes, and it's
(28:35):
like this wasn't the mom Italked to three days ago.
And so, um, I remember takingthe night shifts.
My brother and my dad would gohome.
I would stay at night and watchmy mom's oxygen levels drop.
It was a blue number that I hadto keep my eye on.
(28:56):
When that got low, that was badnews and being really wrecked.
But then I remember pulling outScripture, pulling out the Bible
, reading the book of John toher as she was laying there, and
there was a very strangecomfort, strange presence that
(29:17):
really guarded my heart.
And I remember singing to mymom one of her favorite worship
songs, as unconscious as she was, and my mom, in that induced
coma, lifted up her hands.
It's like she knew I wassinging and she began to worship
God with me and there was apresence that was there.
But that doesn't answer thequestion.
(29:38):
But I do see in that that thegoodness of God is not to be
negated and that the goodness ofGod is something that persists
in time to suffering and givesus hope to look forward to what
we believe Scripture haspromised us.
But it's not a rationalexplanation and it's
incompatible with the scientificworldview.
(29:59):
But I would say that scientificnaturalism doesn't necessarily
get to call the terms all thetime, especially when it comes
to suffering and God.
So there's ways to work thatout, I suppose.
Speaker 1 (30:11):
Yeah, that's interesting that you said that,
because as I was studying, youknow my grandma's story
specifically, I came upon thisinterview just like I think it
was last year, which wasinteresting because I had all
this resources.
But that last thing came at thevery end and she kind of lists
things.
In the end she says you know,when I was in Germany as a
teenager as an Eastern Europeanslave in the concentration camp,
(30:36):
I didn't think that I wouldcome home because there was no
hope.
When I was in prison and I wastortured for her faith, she said
there was no hope.
And when I got married and thepersecution was so intense we
didn't think that we'd make itthrough that year alive.
Yeah because it was so intense.
And you know, she lists allthese things and then she says
(30:57):
at the end she goes but my wayare not God's ways and my
thoughts aren't his thoughts.
And she said God is alwaysfaithful and he's always on time
.
And I'm like how do you saythat after you just list like
you had such a crazy life withconsistent suffering that are
outside your control?
It's not like she induced thesethings to herself and so, in
(31:19):
essence, her hope has alwayslaid in the faith and the good
God in the middle of all that.
And I think one of the thingsthat Timothy Keller also says is
Job never saw why he suffered,but he saw God and that was
enough.
Speaker 2 (31:34):
Yeah, and that that.
That goes back to another.
What you're talking about withthe grandma and what, what
Timothy Keller is saying goesback to sort of a new form of
theodicy that's emerging.
It's not a rational explanationfor it, but it's practical
theodicy.
And how do we, how do wepractically live in defiance of
(31:54):
suffering and evil when it'staking place?
Um, that in a way that produceshope.
And I think that really workswell for charismatics and
pentecostals, because we're notjust philosophers, we're not
philosophers by any sense.
Our tradition is not one of,you know, being a think,
prioritizing the rational, butprioritizing doing.
(32:15):
They were pentecostals weredoers.
Spirit field people are doers.
We, when something takes placethat's tragic, we don't ask why
it happened, we just go there tobe the arms and the hands and
the feet of Jesus.
And there are stories that I wasreading of the Holocaust where
there would be Holocaustprisoners who were being starved
(32:37):
to death and they would get aloaf of bread between them all,
one loaf of bread for all ofthem, and they would really
really take measure to dividethat bread evenly.
Because in dividing that breadevenly, it was a form of justice
that everybody was gettingtheir fair share of that piece
(32:58):
of bread.
And Victor Frankl, I believe,tells a story in his book the
Search for Meaning.
What he's trying to say is thatyou know, there was.
It was this form of justicethat was able to produce hope,
but it was also defiance againstthe evil that put them in the
situation it was.
It was a protest of some sort.
(33:18):
So I think that goodness andthe way that we live our lives
is a protest against the evilthat bears down on them.
And when we are able to liveour lives faithfully, in
faithful witness of the hopethat we have, it does bear
witness that we're okay with notknowing, and but we do have
hope.
Because what else do you do?
I mean you just give into it,we all suffer, and that that
(33:41):
leads you down a real quick pathto nihilism, to life is
meaningless, and even oursuffering is meaningless and
nobody really wants to think.
I mean, that's not what you do.
If an atheist is really honestwith themselves and with the
people that are around them andwants to be faithful to their
commitments, then they have toget up at a funeral and say that
the suffering of the victimreally meant nothing in the long
(34:03):
run.
In the long run it could havemeant something to them.
But even that meaning ismeaninglessness, and I don't
know any that's bold enough todo that.
But that's what they reallythink.
But a Christian can honor theircommitments by getting up there
and saying, hey, I may not haveempirical evidence to do this,
but we do have hope.
And hope comes from the Spirit,and the Spirit is not something
(34:25):
that can be measured empirically.
But we have encountered thishope and we have had this
experience and we can't groundit in anything necessarily
empirical, but it lives in ourhearts.
And if you're asking me whichway I want to choose, I want to
choose the latter.
I don't think it'sphilosophical suicide to do that
, but I think that for theperson that has encountered
Christ and has encountered hisspirit, that's really what makes
(34:47):
sense.
Not to say that my hope has hadno, my suffering has had no
purpose.
I think that's unbearable andit leaves us with absolutely
nothing.
So again, I think, when itcomes to suffering, when we try
to answer it and get to the endof it rationally, we can't do it
(35:08):
theologically, not to the end.
But I don't think we shouldallow the rules of scientific
rationalism to dictate how weapproach the biggest topic in
the world, which is suffering.
Speaker 1 (35:23):
Yeah, well, I want to honor your time and wrap up
this interview.
I know you have to get to class.
You're working on a new book.
Can you just briefly touch onthat and what it's about and
what got you to do it?
Speaker 2 (35:35):
Yeah, it's called A World Without God and it will be
published by ZondervanReflective.
It'll come out in 2026, and itwill kind of get at some of
these things.
What is a world without God?
What does that actually looklike, and how does digital
technology and our advances ininformation really make that
(35:56):
world even more so?
A world without God?
It's just an exploration ofthat creatively, artistically,
as well as philosophically andscripturally.
So it's an interestingengagement, about halfway done
writing it and it's been reallya joy to write.
It's funny, it's snarky, it'shard hitting, but it's hopeful.
Speaker 1 (36:17):
Awesome.
Can't wait to get my hands onthat.
What would you say are twobooks that impacted your life At
the Once we Dare podcast.
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Speaker 2 (37:03):
Yeah, I would probably say.
Well, I was an apocalypsescholar, so I read this book
called Reading RevelationResponsibly by Michael Gorman.
I think people always ask mewhat I think about that book of
Revelation.
That was very impactful for mystudies and was a great
trajectory forward in that theSearch for Meaning by Viktor
(37:24):
Frankl is a book everybodyshould read.
Very impactful for me.
Speaker 1 (37:28):
That definitely is my top three books, for sure.
For sure, and what would yousay is the best advice that
someone gave you?
Just in general, it doesn'thave to be on this topic.
Speaker 2 (37:40):
Yeah, I've gotten a lot of good advice.
I think somebody had meant Iremember I was in college and um
, on my first day of college wewere on an oak tree and um, my
core leader, who's played forthe harlem globetrotters, who
had lived a lot of life he justsaid you know, you guys are
gonna, you're waiting for yourlives to get to a certain point
(38:01):
he goes, but your life's nevergoing to get to that point.
You're going to realize thatyou're just going through.
You're never going to see thatpoint, that hilltop you think.
You see it's not there.
As you live life, you're justgoing to realize you're going
through it and I never forgotthat.
And it gives me pause when Iwant to look towards the next
thing, to remember that all Ihave is the present.
I was driving into school todayand considering my ambitions
(38:24):
and I realized that my now, mypresent, the sunny day that we
have, what I get to do today,the classic antithesis podcast
this is my joy, not the future.
Speaker 1 (38:34):
Yeah, that's beautiful.
That's beautiful.
Last question is what's thebravest thing Dr Palmer has ever
done?
Speaker 2 (38:40):
The bravest thing ever.
Dr Palmer is extremely riskaverse.
Okay, the bravest thing I Iever done is I um, I did my phd.
That was brave.
It was.
You want to talk aboutsuffering.
It was very difficult to dothat.
Um, I never thought I would seethe day.
I remember the first day I did,getting started on it, and I'm
(39:02):
like what am I doing?
It was just me.
And the thesis in the Britishsystem it's just.
You have a supervisor, you talkto you once every six months so
you're on your own.
And I remember standing in thelibrary, didn't even know if I
was supposed to be in thelibrary, like how do I get
started on this?
I never thought I'd finish.
It took courage to do that andit wasn't just a moment of
courage, it was, uh, six years,almost a decade of courage, and
(39:25):
so I'm proud of myself for it.
I can say Awesome.
Speaker 1 (39:29):
Well, Dr Chris Palmer , thank you so much for your
time.
It's been just an honor hearingfrom you and thank you for
coming on.
Speaker 2 (39:35):
Thank you for having me.
Speaker 1 (39:37):
Thank you for listening to the Once we Dare
podcast.
It is an honor to share theseencouraging stories with you.
If you enjoy the show, I wouldlove for you to tell your
friends.
Leave us a reviewer rating andsubscribe to wherever you listen
to podcasts, because this helpsothers discover the show.
(39:57):
You can find me on my website,speckhopoffcom.
This is a really special episode with a unique
guest, dr Chris Palmer, who's apastor and a professor of
theology at SoutheasternUniversity.
Dr Palmer holds a PhD fromBangor University where, in his
thesis, he examined the book ofRevelation and the problem of
evil, suffering and theodicy.
So the big question we ask inthis episode is why is there
(00:20):
human suffering if there is aloving God?
And maybe this is a questionthat you also wrestled with at
(00:48):
some point.
Maybe you're a person of faithand maybe you're not.
But what I was curious about iswhat were the findings from Dr
Palmer's research of over sixyears of digging into the
subject and studying it?
And also I was curious to seewhat made him into the subject
and studying it.
And also I was curious to seewhat made him want to study the
(01:08):
subject of suffering, becauseit's not something that one sets
out to study on a regular day,right?
So let's see what Dr Palmer'sthoughts are on this subject.
Hey friends, welcome to the Oneswho Dared podcast, where
stories of courage are elevated.
I'm your host, becca, and everyother week you'll hear
interviews from inspiring people.
My hope is that you will leaveencouraged.
I'm so glad you're here, drChris Palmer, welcome to the
(01:42):
Once a Year podcast.
I'm so honored that you agreedto come on here.
Speaker 2 (01:47):
It's so good to be with you and thanks for having
me on.
I know that it's hard-pressedto find people that want to talk
about suffering.
Speaker 1 (01:53):
Yeah, so we are the two crazies that actually want
to talk about suffering.
I'll tell you for me why thatwas of importance for me and why
it intrigued me to bring you onin the first place.
So for the last couple of yearsI've been doing some research
in my family history, andspecifically my grandmother, who
was in the Nazi concentrationcamp as a teen.
(02:14):
Then later she became abeliever, suffered for her faith
under the communist governmentin the former Soviet Union, and
so just learning about her story, how much injustice she had to
endure like completely outsideof her control, Right, and so
that made me go into this wholerabbit hole of suffering.
And then I heard you speak onsuffering and you did a whole
(02:37):
thesis and I was like, okay, wejust got to bring this guy on
and let's just dig into it,let's talk about it, you know,
and so.
I'm curious to see what made youstudy suffering, because that
is not a fun subject to study byany means.
Speaker 2 (02:52):
Oh, it's not.
I think that all of us in fact,I know that all of us come to
places in our life where we'reconfronted by various forms of
suffering.
There's all kinds of suffering.
Some of those forms ofsuffering happen because of evil
.
Some of them are just notnecessarily directly connected
to any obvious or apparent sortof evil happened to us.
(03:26):
But with suffering comesquestions, and sometimes those
questions become more than wecan bear, and the way that we
explore those is throughresearch or rational thinking
about that.
When I was pastoring years agothat was about 2018, I went on a
trip to Cambodia to teach tosome of the Cambodian people
that our church had been inpartnership with and I was just
(03:49):
finishing up my master's work atthe time, where I just finished
and I thought about thepossibility of doing doctoral
work, but I really didn't haveanything that was sticking out
to me as what I wanted to do.
Parallel to that time, I wasstanding in the killing fields
of Pol Pot.
We'd had a day to just kind ofexplore Cambodia and hang out
(04:10):
and see what the history was allabout, and then I learned the
fields that I was standing in.
That particular field, 110,000people were killed in the 70s
and had lost their lives underPol Pot's regime and, to my
surprise, lives under Paul Pazregime.
And you know, to my surprise,at the end of that I guess you
(04:30):
could say tour that we were onthere was a tower of skulls 200
feet tall.
You could Google it, it wouldpop up.
I stood before and saw skullsof people that once lived and I
remember focusing on.
It's easy just to see like asea of skulls, but it became all
the more powerful focusing inon individual skulls knowing
that those teeth belong tosomebody, that frame that they
(04:55):
had was somebody, those eyesockets belong to somebody who
saw the world and saw the future, and so it really kind of
stopped me dead in my tracks.
It's hard to shake it and I hada lot of questions that
conflicted with my frameworksfor doing theology and I
realized that in all of myschooling I had never really had
(05:17):
a good answer for suffering andinjustice that takes place at
the hands of a, indirectly atthe hands of a good, benevolent
God, and it's something thatanybody who thinks about God,
who is a theist of some sort,even a deist, thinks about at
some point.
You have to, and it's verydifficult to reconcile those two
(05:38):
things evil, slash, sufferingand the goodness of God.
So for six years I went on ajourney and an exploration and
did my best not to reallyreconcile that question but to
see where a rational explorationof that would lead, especially
for myself who's a Pentecostal.
We're so used to preachinghealing and the goodness of God
(06:00):
and deliverance, and so I reallyleaned into my Pentecostal
tradition to develop thequestion and move it forward.
And it was an interesting sixyears.
Speaker 1 (06:13):
Yeah, and I mean, I think that's a question that
most people ask, even people whoaren't part of faith is like
why is there suffering?
Why is there injustice, why isthere evil in the world?
Like why is there suffering?
Why is there injustice, why isthere evil in the world?
If there is a God and if God islove, as you know, we say he is
, and just the patterns ofhumanity and human history,
there's always been tyrannicalrules.
(06:34):
You have the Roman Empire, asfar back as you can date in
history.
There's just been consistentsuffering, and I think one of
the most common things abouthumanity is none of us are
without suffering.
It may look different forpeople and um, but essentially,
at the end of the day, none ofus can make it out alive without
um, having endured some form ofsuffering and um.
(06:57):
And yeah, it is an interestingthing to reconcile because and
like you said, you didn't reallyreally you didn't go on this
path to reconcile the question,but just to see what would come
of it, what would you get out ofit.
So, from your six years ofresearch, which is a lot to dig
into that, what were some thingsthat you came across that stood
out to you or things that youfelt like you got out of that.
Speaker 2 (07:19):
Yeah.
So where I basically startedwas trying to reconcile that
question.
I thought somehow some dustybook in a library that had yet
to be discovered, or I was goingto rediscover it and kind of
pull something forward thatshows that there's a way to
reconcile the goodness of an allpowerful, all loving God and
(07:42):
the existence of suffering.
And I wasn't able to do thatand I knew that maybe like five
months in, this wasn't going tohappen, you know.
So what do you do?
But I think that the fruitfulpart of it was looking at how
it's been looked at and kind ofseeing that from various
perspectives and how we look atthings, and kind of seeing that
(08:05):
from various perspectives andhow we look at things.
So one of the things that I didargue for in my thesis and made
the argument was that I wasparticularly dealing with the
book of Revelation, although Icould say this pretty
confidently about the entiretyof the biblical text and the
(08:26):
scriptures that we have is thatit's not really, or not at all
an attempt to reconcile thosetwo points the goodness of God
and the existence of evil thatbrings suffering.
There's no rational explanationfor why that happens, the way
that we attempt to try torationalize those things.
It's not formulaic, there's noalgorithm to it.
Particularly in the NewTestament we see portions of
(08:47):
Revelation that deal with it.
We don't see direct mentions ofsuffering as an explanation,
but we see suffering happeningbut nobody really trying to
preach and explain why thesethings happen.
Um, or particularly, I meanthere's.
There's explanations for whycertain sorts of suffering
happens, but no real explanationfor the goodness of God and
(09:07):
suffering.
And so this is more of aphilosophical question.
It gets out of theology and Iwould argue that theology is
everything that takes placeinside of the world of the text.
So when we're talking theology,we're making sense of what
actually is in scripture, what'sthere.
But if it's not there, thenwe're moving away from it and
(09:31):
we're coming into moreabstractions and we're talking
about philosophy at that moment.
And so, kind of going back towhen this really became the
question of all questions I wasable to.
What I found is is you know,this question goes back all the
way to.
Epicurus was asking these sortsof questions.
It kind of moved its way alongthroughout history.
But it really settles uponculture, I suppose in society in
(09:55):
the 17th century, when there isa great, or 18th century, when
there's a great earthquake inlisbon and people lose their
lives on um november 1st, okay,which is all saints day, people
are going to church in lisbonand people lose their lives.
On November 1st, which is AllSaints Day, people are going to
church in Lisbon.
They're going to recognize thegoodness of God and God's mercy,
and this earthquake takes placeand people lose their lives and
(10:15):
they die.
How do you reconcile that?
I mean 30,000 people died in anearthquake.
That's 10 times what we had in9-11.
And Voltaire begins this harshcritique on God.
He begins to kind of move itaway from the goodness of God
into why would God let somethinglike this happen?
And that's the framework thatwe have to work with today.
(10:36):
That's what we're dealing with,and so when you look at the
question, you start with twosuppositions.
You have two of them that arediametrically opposed.
God is good, god isall-powerful, you have the
qualities of God and you haveevil exists.
And so when you're dealing withthese sorts of premises, you
(10:58):
have to reconcile them, but inreconciling them, you always
prioritize one over the other.
Prior to this earthquake, peopleprioritized the fact that God
was good.
That was unquestionable, andyou'd look at the world in the
lens of the goodness of God.
You would just see the worldthat way, and though suffering
was taking place, that was anuncompromisable premise.
(11:19):
I mean, others would do it.
You can find writings of peopledoing it, but that wasn't
apropos or the default settingof the day.
Fast forward to this, earthquaketakes place, then the premises
and how people begin toprioritize those, it gets
changed, and so now you havesuffering happens.
What are you going to do aboutthe goodness of God?
(11:40):
And so that kind of sets us ina trajectory where we find
ourselves today because of whatour advances in science and what
modernity has given to us, anage where we have developed in
technology, developed ininformation.
It's really borne down on ourscientific worldview that we've
taken from the Enlightenment,and so God is really in his
(12:02):
characteristics and hisqualities is ours.
The burden of proof is ontheists to really prove that out
, and it's very difficult to doempirically or rationally, and
that's why in apologetic circles, once that question comes up,
it is an unanswerable question.
No-transcript a.
(12:23):
I've seen good answers, but Ihaven't seen that smoking gun
that everybody wants, and Idon't think we're going to see
that, because I think that thatkind of moves us along to the
nature of faith and belief.
So that's where we findourselves and yes, it's, it
seems grim, but it really isn't,because there's other ways
forward, I think.
Speaker 1 (12:44):
Yeah.
So when you say good answers,what are some of the good
theories that people come upwith for suffering?
Speaker 2 (12:50):
Like you have free will.
Speaker 1 (12:51):
So there's evil in the world because we're free to
do what we want.
Speaker 2 (12:57):
Yeah.
So there's several of them,there's three I think, that are
namely pretty popular.
They're called theodicies.
I'm sure of course you're awareof that.
Theodicy is a big word.
It's not to be something thatintimidates.
It's theos, which is the wordGod, and DK, which means justice
or defense, or it gives theidea of a court case.
So theodicy is a defense of God.
(13:19):
You're essentially, when you'redoing theodicy it can be used
as a verb You're attempting todefend God from the accusations
that are made where he's kind ofon the hot seat and even though
he's not directly responsible.
I mean we could kind of do awaywith some of the language in
the Old Testament as beinghyperbolic or suggest that it
wasn't as literal.
You can do all that, but youcan't get away from the fact
(13:40):
that if this happened, that it'splausible that God is
indirectly responsible for thesethings.
So he would be on the hot seatIf he had the power to stop it.
He didn't.
He's indirectly the cause ofevil.
So theodicy comes along andattempts to defend God from
being on that hot seat, asyou're mentioning.
The first one that is verypopular and is the most popular
(14:01):
is the Augustinian free willtheodicy that people use.
It's essentially that humankindhad free will and because of
their free will they broughtevil into the earth.
And now there's this uh planthat we're on where god is
redeeming us through christjesus, because of the evil that
we caused, because of free will,and that has traditionally made
(14:23):
its way around the church themost, and probably is something
that pastors and teachers willuse to lean into.
I don't think two things.
I think what Augustine wasdoing was he was attempting to
use theology as a way to answerthat question.
I don't think the Bible isreally trying to by showing that
man has used free will tochoose sinfulness.
(14:47):
I don't think that is the textexplaining to us.
This is why this is how youreconcile those two propositions
.
I don't think that's whatthat's doing, not an attempt to
reconcile that.
It's just telling the story andthen, kind of, we read our, we
use our paradigms to tell thatstory.
But the problem with the freewill theodicy is that it is
limited.
(15:07):
It doesn't really get toquestions that are deeper than
that.
Okay, so let's just take him athis premise that free will is
what brought evil into the world.
Well then the next questionbecomes if God truly created a
perfect world and all thingsperfect, why did the ability to
choose evil actually exist?
(15:29):
And where did the evil comefrom if all things were perfect
for it to exist?
And then, quite naturally, thenext response is well, it came
from satan.
Well then, that whole scheme ofthinking goes back to satan and
angels, and so eventually youkind of have to appeal, appeal
to mystery, and then it doesn'treally get at where the impulse,
um, to choose evil came.
(15:49):
I mean, if before the choosingof evil, there has to be the
thought to choose evil or theimpulse to choose evil that's
part of the equation where didthat come and why even is there
a choice?
It would seem that somethingthat's perfect is always going
to choose perfectly.
Um, that's, that's one of thearguments.
And so, and if all thingsperfect, why is there an
imperfect choice to make?
(16:10):
So we could explore that moreif we'd like to, but it goes
down that road and it nevercomes back from that road.
So you move away from that.
And then the next ways toexplain evil one would be the
soul-making theodicy.
This is pretty popular in a lotof our Christian writings that
(16:30):
we find when we're talking aboutnominal forms of suffering.
The reason why I dented my car,because I was in a rush and I
backed into a pole and God wastrying to teach me patience.
Or you know the reason why Ilost my keys today and I was
(16:53):
late for work and I ended uplosing my job.
You know, something like thatis God's just trying to teach me
to slow down, and so all theforms of suffering that we
experienced become ways that webuild up our God is building us
and making us and he's shapingus.
And where that maybe can beargued in scripture are passages
where that's exactly whatpersecution does.
(17:16):
I mean there is directconnections to persecution being
something that producesfaithfulness in the believer,
something that producesrighteousness in the believer,
that helps us to understand thesufferings of Christ.
But those are connections topersecution that actually have
to do with following Jesus.
The problem with this sort ofsoul-making suffering is that it
(17:37):
works for some things.
I would never deny somebody whosays you know, I lost my keys
and God taught me patience.
That's very possible, that's agiven.
But what do we do withsomething like you're talking
about?
When it comes to the holocaust?
How do you explain a genocide?
Right, the genocide happened sothat the world could learn
about, about what so it costs?
(17:58):
You know, six million pluspeople, their lives a whole,
this is what it takes.
Or you know somebody who'scoming out of 9-11 and saying
the reason this happened is sothat this could happen.
Well, what about the sufferers,the 3,000 people, and then
their families?
And then you know it's easy toreally make the soul-making
(18:19):
theodicy work when you'reexperiencing minimal forms of
suffering.
Or you're not the suffererforms of suffering, or you're
not the sufferer.
Now some people will use thattheory to kind of explain their
conditions and and I'm notsaying that that hasn't been
done, it can't be done, but itonly gets really so far, uh, and
.
And then you have to ask otherquestions like, well, why does
(18:39):
it take this, why does it takeme suffering, why can't god do
it some other way?
And that that's a validquestion for that.
And so at you know, at worst itbecomes a little bit
insensitive, not a little bit, awhole lot of it, insensitive at
points.
And you know it should never bea default reaction.
When someone comes into youroffice and is looking for
(19:01):
pastoral care and they'reexplaining why, you know they're
, they're going throughsomething traumatic in their
lives and you know, you kind ofpoint to it and they say, well,
I've had an abused past.
Well, the reason you've had anabused past is because look at
you now, you know you're doingso great in ministry and it's
like really.
This is all to do good inministry.
That's what it came down.
I had to go through this.
(19:22):
What about all the other peoplethat have to go through that?
And then, of course, maybe aneven more popular one is greater
good theodicy.
So you're not talking aboutnecessarily.
This was used to build up mysoul, but God lets evil happen
so that he can perform a greatergood.
So God allowed sin into theworld and God allowed evil into
the world because we're going tohave the new Jerusalem now.
(19:44):
That's going to be even better.
So God got this huge victory inspite of sin, or you know,
tragedies have produced agreater good for society.
You know, a child loses hislife in a car accident, but it
brings the community together.
But again, those kind of go backto the same questions why did
it have to be through this?
Couldn't have been through that?
(20:05):
What kind of abhorhorrent,monstrous god would choose the
death of a child to bring acommunity together?
Now it can bring a communitytogether, but the question
that's actually being answeredasked is why did it take this to
to do that?
I mean, good can come out ofevil, but does good require evil
and suffering to actually takeplace?
(20:27):
That's what that theodicy isadvancing and and it's if you're
hard-pressed to say that's thecase, and so a lot of these
theodicies kind of lock you intosomething that's dangerous, and
that is god absolutely needs umsuffering to bring about these
goods and god doesn't need.
God does not need suffering andgod does not need evil, he is
not codependent on evil to bringabout these goods and God
(20:47):
doesn't need, god does not needsuffering and God does not need
evil, he is not codependent onevil to bring about his good.
And so it leaves our minds kindof boggled.
But then, you know, you movesort of forward in all this and
you have a group called theanti-theodicy or
anti-theodicists, and they'rejust completely against thinking
about and exploring sufferingand in any rational way.
(21:09):
At first, you know, I was like,okay, I like this because they
feel that when you talk aboutevil and suffering it, we do
have minds and we just can'tturn them off when it comes to
(21:29):
evil and that there is a placefor rationally talking about
these types of things.
But I think, you know, thehealthy thing is to suppose that
these do work in some cases,but they don't work in all cases
and, um, you know, they do findtheir limits, and so it kind of
leads us back to square one.
So so how do you reconcile thetwo, the two premises, and
(21:52):
rationally they'reirreconcilable in my opinion.
Speaker 1 (22:00):
Okay, Well, that was, that was like well, that's
great.
Speaker 2 (22:03):
But how do you go from here?
Speaker 1 (22:05):
You know, um, but like in your study, what, what
would you say were some of thethings that you walked away with
?
Like okay I've done six yearsand I've been told like maybe
next subject you study will bejoy, so you don't have to in
order to like experience it.
And maybe in in those six yearsyou've had your own share of
(22:28):
suffering.
I don't know.
But what were some of yourconclusions or your takeaway
from that?
Speaker 2 (22:37):
Yeah.
So that's a great question.
I think you know I always getthis response especially.
You know, thanksgivings were alot of fun when I was studying
all this because I would behaving a good time.
And here comes Chris theSufferer.
That was my nickname, by theway.
All throughout my thesis wasChris the Sufferer, because I
was thinking about it so indepth and I'm in Florida now.
(22:59):
I think I knew I needed the sun,you know, to get me out of this
dark gloom of suffering.
But there are a lot of peoplethat have to really think about
suffering.
I mean, I would remind people Iwas blessed that up to this
point in my life I haven't hadto think about suffering other
than rationally, throughself-study and analysis, instead
of experientially, becausethere are people every day that
(23:20):
are going to the hospital andvisiting their sick loved ones
and have to think about it allday, every day.
I think there's a few thingsthat were takeaways, big
takeaways for me, and I thinkthat I hope to contribute to
Pentecostal ethos and thePentecostal theology of
suffering.
Number one suffering is causedby evil.
It's not a rational enterprisein its fullness.
(23:44):
We can't.
This is not going to besolvable and it's going to take
more than thinking to really getus out of this and that may
just be something that we haveto understand when we're doing
apologetics is that this deadends at some point.
But thankfully, our apologeticand our defense of Christ
doesn't end with where we answerthe suffering question.
(24:07):
I think our greatest apologeticis the Spirit and how the
Spirit moves us and how the HolySpirit moves us in suffering,
that there's something isconvicting about the fact that,
yeah, we don't really know whythis happens totally and why
evil is doing what it's doing,but we do know that.
We do know the story that Godsent Christ into the world and
(24:27):
that he sent the Spirit from theSon, and the Spirit is what
empowers us to act responsiblyand to act in forms of
restoration while people aresuffering, and those aren't
always grandiose ways.
I was reading a story in theearly Pentecostal literature
(24:48):
when I did my studies, and thestory is called Pentecost at a
Funeral and there was a womanwho was deeply grieved at the
loss of her child I think thechild was it couldn't have been
more than three months old.
The child was sick and thechild died.
And there was a pastor his namewas Pastor Clark Eckert and his
wife and they went to ministerto the Beree family.
(25:08):
And the was a pastor his namewas Pastor Clark Eckert and his
wife, and they went to ministerto the Bereave family.
And the pastor's telling thisfirst-person narrative and he's
not trying to posit any sort oftheodicy.
There's no explanation, butthere is a genuine, we would say
, a move of the Spirit.
There's a genuine demonstrationor presence of the Spirit that
was with that woman.
That was able to not mitigateher suffering or to try to
(25:35):
explain away what had takenplace, but it was enough to
bring that woman a hope that shewould see her daughter again or
her child again not sure it wasa girl or boy, but that she
would see her child again, seeher daughter again or her child
again I'm not sure it was a girlor boy but that she would see
her child again and that herchild would was in the arms of
Christ and in the arms of Jesus.
And there's no real explanationfor that, as to why that
(25:58):
happened, but it is.
It's a.
And then in that there's allthese other things that take
place.
I mean there's reading ofScripture that takes place
concerning comfort.
They're able to go to the bookof Ephesians and they see the
text in a way that they haven'tseen before.
They see the goodness of God inways that they haven't seen
before.
And so I think that insuffering, there's ways about
(26:22):
suffering, there's things thathappen within those that help us
to draw on the goodness of God,to realize the goodness of God
that's taking place, and insteadof just seeing monster God and
hateful God, somehow we stillsee the goodness of God, and
that is, I think, one of thethings that we have to draw on
(26:43):
is the Spirit's response.
There's also examples of peoplewho are the sufferers
themselves in the text andthey're going through the
suffering.
But the same thing, there'sreally a move of the Spirit in
the presence of God, wherethey're able to see suffering,
and they're suffering and notrelent and not lose hope.
(27:04):
So, as a Pentecostal, I thinkit's important that in times of
suffering, that we're able todraw on the Spirit and hear the
Spirit in those forms you know,in the book of Revelation.
When you have these churches,like the church at Smyrna or the
church at Philadelphia, andthey're going through suffering,
what Christ says to them ishear what the Spirit is saying.
(27:30):
I think that there's in thosemoments an opportunity to hear
the Spirit, hear what the Spiritis saying and that ministers to
us in our suffering, but itdoesn't answer it, it doesn't
give us the question, it tellshow to reconcile the premises,
but there's opportunity insuffering, whether we're the
sufferer or someone else is thesufferer, to understand the
(27:52):
goodness of God.
It kind of brings me back to acouple of well, I'd say, a year
and a half ago, when, at the endof my thesis, when my mom, you
know, goes to the hospital andshe's, I get a call one day and
I was living in Tennessee thatmy mom is, you know, has sepsis.
It just kind of happened.
She had a stomach ache, shegoes to the hospital, she goes
(28:13):
septic, and I get a random callthat my mom, who is pretty
healthy, who I just had talkedto a couple of days ago, you
know, come home.
You're going to be sayinggoodbye to your mom.
So that's a lot to just get inone afternoon.
So I, that's a lot to just getin one afternoon.
So I'm a wreck and drive up totennessee as fast as I can.
Get to the hospital.
My mom is all hooked up, youknow, breathing tubes, and it's
(28:35):
like this wasn't the mom Italked to three days ago.
And so, um, I remember takingthe night shifts.
My brother and my dad would gohome.
I would stay at night and watchmy mom's oxygen levels drop.
It was a blue number that I hadto keep my eye on.
(28:56):
When that got low, that was badnews and being really wrecked.
But then I remember pulling outScripture, pulling out the Bible
, reading the book of John toher as she was laying there, and
there was a very strangecomfort, strange presence that
(29:17):
really guarded my heart.
And I remember singing to mymom one of her favorite worship
songs, as unconscious as she was, and my mom, in that induced
coma, lifted up her hands.
It's like she knew I wassinging and she began to worship
God with me and there was apresence that was there.
But that doesn't answer thequestion.
(29:38):
But I do see in that that thegoodness of God is not to be
negated and that the goodness ofGod is something that persists
in time to suffering and givesus hope to look forward to what
we believe Scripture haspromised us.
But it's not a rationalexplanation and it's
incompatible with the scientificworldview.
(29:59):
But I would say that scientificnaturalism doesn't necessarily
get to call the terms all thetime, especially when it comes
to suffering and God.
So there's ways to work thatout, I suppose.
Speaker 1 (30:11):
Yeah, that's interesting that you said that,
because as I was studying, youknow my grandma's story
specifically, I came upon thisinterview just like I think it
was last year, which wasinteresting because I had all
this resources.
But that last thing came at thevery end and she kind of lists
things.
In the end she says you know,when I was in Germany as a
teenager as an Eastern Europeanslave in the concentration camp,
(30:36):
I didn't think that I wouldcome home because there was no
hope.
When I was in prison and I wastortured for her faith, she said
there was no hope.
And when I got married and thepersecution was so intense we
didn't think that we'd make itthrough that year alive.
Yeah because it was so intense.
And you know, she lists allthese things and then she says
(30:57):
at the end she goes but my wayare not God's ways and my
thoughts aren't his thoughts.
And she said God is alwaysfaithful and he's always on time
.
And I'm like how do you saythat after you just list like
you had such a crazy life withconsistent suffering that are
outside your control?
It's not like she induced thesethings to herself and so, in
(31:19):
essence, her hope has alwayslaid in the faith and the good
God in the middle of all that.
And I think one of the thingsthat Timothy Keller also says is
Job never saw why he suffered,but he saw God and that was
enough.
Speaker 2 (31:34):
Yeah, and that that.
That goes back to another.
What you're talking about withthe grandma and what, what
Timothy Keller is saying goesback to sort of a new form of
theodicy that's emerging.
It's not a rational explanationfor it, but it's practical
theodicy.
And how do we, how do wepractically live in defiance of
(31:54):
suffering and evil when it'staking place?
Um, that in a way that produceshope.
And I think that really workswell for charismatics and
pentecostals, because we're notjust philosophers, we're not
philosophers by any sense.
Our tradition is not one of,you know, being a think,
prioritizing the rational, butprioritizing doing.
(32:15):
They were pentecostals weredoers.
Spirit field people are doers.
We, when something takes placethat's tragic, we don't ask why
it happened, we just go there tobe the arms and the hands and
the feet of Jesus.
And there are stories that I wasreading of the Holocaust where
there would be Holocaustprisoners who were being starved
(32:37):
to death and they would get aloaf of bread between them all,
one loaf of bread for all ofthem, and they would really
really take measure to dividethat bread evenly.
Because in dividing that breadevenly, it was a form of justice
that everybody was gettingtheir fair share of that piece
(32:58):
of bread.
And Victor Frankl, I believe,tells a story in his book the
Search for Meaning.
What he's trying to say is thatyou know, there was.
It was this form of justicethat was able to produce hope,
but it was also defiance againstthe evil that put them in the
situation it was.
It was a protest of some sort.
(33:18):
So I think that goodness andthe way that we live our lives
is a protest against the evilthat bears down on them.
And when we are able to liveour lives faithfully, in
faithful witness of the hopethat we have, it does bear
witness that we're okay with notknowing, and but we do have
hope.
Because what else do you do?
I mean you just give into it,we all suffer, and that that
(33:41):
leads you down a real quick pathto nihilism, to life is
meaningless, and even oursuffering is meaningless and
nobody really wants to think.
I mean, that's not what you do.
If an atheist is really honestwith themselves and with the
people that are around them andwants to be faithful to their
commitments, then they have toget up at a funeral and say that
the suffering of the victimreally meant nothing in the long
(34:03):
run.
In the long run it could havemeant something to them.
But even that meaning ismeaninglessness, and I don't
know any that's bold enough todo that.
But that's what they reallythink.
But a Christian can honor theircommitments by getting up there
and saying, hey, I may not haveempirical evidence to do this,
but we do have hope.
And hope comes from the Spirit,and the Spirit is not something
(34:25):
that can be measured empirically.
But we have encountered thishope and we have had this
experience and we can't groundit in anything necessarily
empirical, but it lives in ourhearts.
And if you're asking me whichway I want to choose, I want to
choose the latter.
I don't think it'sphilosophical suicide to do that
, but I think that for theperson that has encountered
Christ and has encountered hisspirit, that's really what makes
(34:47):
sense.
Not to say that my hope has hadno, my suffering has had no
purpose.
I think that's unbearable andit leaves us with absolutely
nothing.
So again, I think, when itcomes to suffering, when we try
to answer it and get to the endof it rationally, we can't do it
(35:08):
theologically, not to the end.
But I don't think we shouldallow the rules of scientific
rationalism to dictate how weapproach the biggest topic in
the world, which is suffering.
Speaker 1 (35:23):
Yeah, well, I want to honor your time and wrap up
this interview.
I know you have to get to class.
You're working on a new book.
Can you just briefly touch onthat and what it's about and
what got you to do it?
Speaker 2 (35:35):
Yeah, it's called A World Without God and it will be
published by ZondervanReflective.
It'll come out in 2026, and itwill kind of get at some of
these things.
What is a world without God?
What does that actually looklike, and how does digital
technology and our advances ininformation really make that
(35:56):
world even more so?
A world without God?
It's just an exploration ofthat creatively, artistically,
as well as philosophically andscripturally.
So it's an interestingengagement, about halfway done
writing it and it's been reallya joy to write.
It's funny, it's snarky, it'shard hitting, but it's hopeful.
Speaker 1 (36:17):
Awesome.
Can't wait to get my hands onthat.
What would you say are twobooks that impacted your life At
the Once we Dare podcast.
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Speaker 2 (37:03):
Yeah, I would probably say.
Well, I was an apocalypsescholar, so I read this book
called Reading RevelationResponsibly by Michael Gorman.
I think people always ask mewhat I think about that book of
Revelation.
That was very impactful for mystudies and was a great
trajectory forward in that theSearch for Meaning by Viktor
(37:24):
Frankl is a book everybodyshould read.
Very impactful for me.
Speaker 1 (37:28):
That definitely is my top three books, for sure.
For sure, and what would yousay is the best advice that
someone gave you?
Just in general, it doesn'thave to be on this topic.
Speaker 2 (37:40):
Yeah, I've gotten a lot of good advice.
I think somebody had meant Iremember I was in college and um
, on my first day of college wewere on an oak tree and um, my
core leader, who's played forthe harlem globetrotters, who
had lived a lot of life he justsaid you know, you guys are
gonna, you're waiting for yourlives to get to a certain point
(38:01):
he goes, but your life's nevergoing to get to that point.
You're going to realize thatyou're just going through.
You're never going to see thatpoint, that hilltop you think.
You see it's not there.
As you live life, you're justgoing to realize you're going
through it and I never forgotthat.
And it gives me pause when Iwant to look towards the next
thing, to remember that all Ihave is the present.
I was driving into school todayand considering my ambitions
(38:24):
and I realized that my now, mypresent, the sunny day that we
have, what I get to do today,the classic antithesis podcast
this is my joy, not the future.
Speaker 1 (38:34):
Yeah, that's beautiful.
That's beautiful.
Last question is what's thebravest thing Dr Palmer has ever
done?
Speaker 2 (38:40):
The bravest thing ever.
Dr Palmer is extremely riskaverse.
Okay, the bravest thing I Iever done is I um, I did my phd.
That was brave.
It was.
You want to talk aboutsuffering.
It was very difficult to dothat.
Um, I never thought I would seethe day.
I remember the first day I did,getting started on it, and I'm
(39:02):
like what am I doing?
It was just me.
And the thesis in the Britishsystem it's just.
You have a supervisor, you talkto you once every six months so
you're on your own.
And I remember standing in thelibrary, didn't even know if I
was supposed to be in thelibrary, like how do I get
started on this?
I never thought I'd finish.
It took courage to do that andit wasn't just a moment of
courage, it was, uh, six years,almost a decade of courage, and
(39:25):
so I'm proud of myself for it.
I can say Awesome.
Speaker 1 (39:29):
Well, Dr Chris Palmer , thank you so much for your
time.
It's been just an honor hearingfrom you and thank you for
coming on.
Speaker 2 (39:35):
Thank you for having me.
Speaker 1 (39:37):
Thank you for listening to the Once we Dare
podcast.
It is an honor to share theseencouraging stories with you.
If you enjoy the show, I wouldlove for you to tell your
friends.
Leave us a reviewer rating andsubscribe to wherever you listen
to podcasts, because this helpsothers discover the show.
(39:57):
You can find me on my website,speckhopoffcom.
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